Tag Archives: Wild Space: Transformation

Welcome to the Launch Week Celebration for Wild Space: Transformations. All week long, I will be blogging about exciting topics that revolve around the Wild Space series. I hope you’ll join me all week as I blog about the series and go behind the scenes to reveal exciting details that have gone into making this new book.

The first detail I’m going to discuss is probably one of the most obvious.

You might have noticed a not-so-familiar ship gracing the cover of Wild Space: Transformations. What ship is this that is exploding before your very eyes? This is the Independence of course – a new and improved Independence.

The Independence has officially received an upgrade and she makes her debut in Wild Space: Transformations. She is also going to be gracing the covers of the other five books in the first series. On release day (March 7th, 2017), all six covers will feature the redesigned co-star of the Wild Space series.

When I released Wild Space: Onslaught, I had a designer create 1 digital drawing of a ship that became my sole model for the creation of the book covers for Wild Space Series 1. However, I was never really happy with this design and I didn’t have much flexibility when posing the ship. The most I could do was turn it this way or that way or flip the image around so it appeared to be flying in a different direction.

But three weeks ago, I discovered a wonderful website: SolCommand.com that offered free, 3D model images that I have been able to customize to my liking. Furthermore, I can edit the 3D model with Windows 3D and then put it into PhotoShop and pose it for new, dramatic angles to create exciting covers.

SolCommand also gave me the ability to add more ships on my book covers and create explosive scenes. As I will be discussing later on this week, I was able to create an Imperial Battleship which will now be seen on the covers of Onslaught, and Ghosts, and select installments of Series 2 when those books begin launching later this year.

This Independence at last matches the realities of what I describe in my book. The Independence is built to house a crew of nearly 200 – depending on the needs of the mission. It also uses three forms of propulsion.

Thrusters were an original design on the ship to be used for moving into orbit around a planet or for maneuvering through space.

There is the Interplanetary Jump Drive which is the main drive that helps the crew navigate between planets in travels that can last for a few weeks.

Finally, there is the Deep Space Drive – which is designed to travel vast distances and cut down a 20 year journey between Earth’s United System of Planets and Wild Space. This was the engine that was destroyed in Onslaught.

The original model of the Independence never looked big enough to be able to house all of these features, but this design makes my vision come to life.

So, you might be asking yourself, “Why go through all the trouble of developing a new model to serve as the Independence, only to blow it up in Wild Space: Transformations?”

That is a really great question.

Be sure to read Transformations to discover the answer. Wild Space: Transformations, releases tomorrow, March 7th, 2017 at midnight.

I’ll be back tomorrow to continue the week long Launch Week Celebration with a blog post looking at the making of Wild Space: Transformations – without spoilers. Be sure to follow me on Facebook so you know when the post goes live.